March saw the
release of Treehouse #5 and featured two of my comics; 'The Martians:
To Them and Not to Us, Perhaps, is the Future Ordained...' and 'I Don't
Give a Fuck' (the former drawn by Neil Paterson). I did a reading of
both stories at the Scottish Comics Unconference in Glasgow, arranged
by Damon Herd and Hattie Kennedy.

Photo: Damon Herd

Then a week later, I did a talk on
the topic 'My Favourite Comics Page' at Chris Murray and Phillip
Vaughan's 'Comics, So What?' event at the University of Dundee.

In the wee small
hours of the 19th April, I finished inking the last page
of my story 'Dump'. A notable event for me as I'd been working on the
comic for many years.

On the last
day of the month, I released the third and final issue of Dump.

In June, Treehouse
#6 was published, containing three stories by me; 'Jeff Wayne's
Musical Version of The War of the Worlds: an Introduction', 'Bruce
the Rat in One Adventure Too Many', and 'Junior Scrabbl'.

The first issue of
Emily White's Jack Sprat Magazine was released in September. In it
was a comic I did called 'Silently Falling', inspired by the title of
a song by Chris Squire, who sadly died this year.

In October, I did a
talk at the Make/Share event at the MakerSpace in the Vision
building, Dundee about my comics, focussing on the four most recent
ones I'd done; 'No Greater Love', 'Tiddlywinks', 'Silently Falling' and 'A
Book with Death in the Title'.

This last story was
included in Treehouse #7. along with another called 'Marriage
Statistics', and a cover by me too.

Redbird Review ran the first part of my
new 56 page story called Bell Time. I'll complete a new page every 3
weeks.

I curated a Treehouse Comics exhibition that ran for a month
and a half at Arbroath Library. I also gave a talk on Super-Hero comics to a book group for 8-11 year olds there.

In November, I did a
comic called 'Frankensteins', and read it at the Frankenstein Begins
comic launch event at the McManus Galleries in Dundee.

It's been a good and
busy year for me in comics. I have every intention for 2016 to be the
same. Some plans are in motion right now. I'll be continuing Bell
Time. I've been working on a comics project with my two sons, which
has been great fun. I'm putting together my next comic Zero Sum
Bubblegum (which will include guest artists – some returning, some
new – all great!) I want to do a collected edition of Berserkotron,
too. My involvement with Treehouse Comics is always a pleasure, and
the next edition's comics by me are in the can. I'm also appearing in
the next issue of Copy This!

Get yourself
involved in things you want to do. It's worth the effort and hard
work.

Wednesday, December 30, 2015

An enjoyable job I decided to do recently was give a talk to a book group of 8-11 year olds on the subject of super-heroes. I like to use the wider interest in the movies to lead them back to the comics.

I thought I'd post the powerpoint I used. It might be helpful to anyone out there wanting to do a similar thing.

They're in alphabetical order. The text was also cut back to bullet words when I gave the talk.

Fortuitously, the first one up - Ant-Man - was also the most recent. The kids were on board right away. The format is comic image on the left; movie image on the right.

The Avengers covered a lot of the Marvel heroes they had heard of. Another thing I wanted to get across to them was how old these characters are. Between 50 - 80 odd years. Long enough for adults; an unthinkable eternity for these youngsters.

Why 'Batman: Year One'? The comics images were chosen by the criteria that they were titles that were available to loan in the library.

The movie images were chosen in the main to be the most recent iteration of the characters. I told the group I hadn't seen the most recent Fantastic Four movie. 'It's not good' opined one kid. Oh dear.

I like the similarity between the Flash comic and TV show images here. And I couldn't resist putting that groan-worthy comment at the end.

I made sure to point out the distinction of The Incredibles not being from a comic.
One of the children at this point put his hand up to tell me that he had a DVD of The Incredibles and the first disc was very good but the second was boring. It just has people talking on it. I enjoyed that interjection.

During discussion of Spider-Man, the laptop shut down altogether for an update. Thank you, Microsoft.
It allowed me to steal more time with the group and answer their questions though.

Always got to reference the mountains of cash a few comics like the first Superman appearance sell for. It gets an 'oo' and an 'ah' from the adults too.

The photo above (chosen for its dramatic qualities) caused some immediate intrigue, and the question 'Wait, has Wonder Woman been in a movie?'
I mentioned the possible connection between the lie detector machine and Wonder Woman's lasso of truth.

X-Men were the last characters chosen by me, then I wanted to give the kids a chance to mention their favourites with this:

Many suggestions followed, including Firestorm, Doctor Who and Jedi Knights. Some lateral thinking there. Why not? They have super-powers.

An enjoyable talk for me, and the group were very engaged and appeared to like it.